The present and future generations of satellites need to operate with small earth terminals such as mobile vehicle or hand held terminals. Such satellites need to be user oriented in that the user terminal needs to be relatively less complex, using low power, having low weight and low cost. Such requirement may be achieved at the cost of increasing the complexity, such as with space borne equipment and the central earth stations. Present day technology involves such processing on board the satellite. An example of such a system is mobile messaging service via satellites. In such a system, a forward link takes messages from an earth station to the satellite, which retransmits to the mobiles over spot beams. The return link begins at the mobiles, goes up to the satellite and terminates at the earth station. In such a system, the types of transmitter and receivers in the forward and reverse links may be different. Thus the optimum uplink and downlink designs to and from the mobiles and the earth stations may be very different requiring frequency translation achieved by channelization.
In the case of a multiple access communications system, the uplink uses frequency division multiple access (FDMA) signaling with low cost and low complexity terminals while the downlink uses time division multiple access (TDMA) signaling to maximize the satellite radiated power without intermodulation noise. In such systems, the small earth terminals do not need the capability of transmitting at very high burst rate and stringent satellite frame synchronization capabilities necessary for TDMA transmitter. In another multiple access system, uplink is based on random access technique while the downlink uses TDMA. In terms of modulation, all such multiple access systems make use of digital techniques with inherent advantages in terms of power efficiency, flexibility, error correction and detection coding and encryption. The feasibility of mixed mode multiple accessing techniques requires efficient means of translation between the two formats of multiple access system. Although analog techniques are in principle straightforward, in terms of implementation considerations of size, weight, cost, and flexibility, direct digital method are expected to achieve higher performance. Digital techniques can also fully exploit advances in VLSI and ASIC technologies to achieve these speed and costs objectives. Such translation may involve conversion of an FDMA signal into a TDM multiplexed signal, which may then go through a digital switch to various TDMA carriers being transmitted over the spot beams. Such digital translation techniques are also useful in the switching of FDMA carriers to different spot beams with out requiring arrays of analog bandpass filters and converters. There are several techniques for direct digital translation and switching using a channelization method where a wide band signal is channelized and individual channels are respectively processed.
Optimum system design in such cases may involve different multiple accessing techniques on the uplink and downlink. The feasibility of mixed mode multiple accessing techniques requires an efficient means of translation between the two formats of multiple accessing communication systems. There are several digital techniques available for translation, that is channelization, namely, an analytical signal method, a polyphase Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) method, a frequency domain FFT filtering method, weight, overlap and add (WOLA) method, and a tree filter multistage bank method. The analytical signal method, frequency domain FFT filtering method, and the multistage filtering method are computationally complex, the weight, overlap and add method involves processing of the input signal in blocks. Among these prior methods, the polyphase DFT method is the most efficient in terms of computational efficiencies and processes the input signal on a sample-by-sample basis.
In terms of computational efficiency and the ease of sample-by-sample processing, the polyphase DFT approach is the most attractive as the number of computations required per sample of the input signal processing increases linearly with log2 K where K is the number of channels. However, the polyphase channelizer that possesses this computational advantage is only applicable to the case where K is equal to the decimation factor M or an integer multiple. There are many significant applications where K is not equal to M or an integer multiple and it is desirable to achieve the same computational advantage as for the case of K equal to M.
The conventional polyphase DFT communication channelizer includes an analyzer for channelization and a synthesizer for dechannelization. The conventional polyphase DFT analyzer includes a front end complex downconverter for downconverting an input wideband signal into a complex input fed into an input clockwise commutator for round robin sampling for providing M channelized outputs. The M channelized outputs are fed into a filter bank of K filters to provide K filtered outputs to an FFT, the FFT outputs constitute the K channelized outputs. The input to the analyzer is the sampled version of the multiplexed signal comprising K channel signals. This polyphase DFT analyzer is computationally efficient where M=K providing a homogenous mapping between the M commutator output the K number of filters in the filter bank. That is, the polyphase analyzer includes a commutator followed by a bank of polyphase filters having filter outputs that are processed by the FFT processor. The FFT processor outputs are the desired K channels. All of the channel signals have equal one-sided bandwidth of B Hz. The sampled input is an analytic complex signal that may be obtained by a Hilbert transform operation on the real IF bandpass signal. In the polyphase analyzer for the case of K=M, all of the K channels share a common polyphase filter bank. The ith polyphase branch filter has a impulse response pi(m) given by pi(m)=h(mM−i) for i=0, 1, . . . , M−1, where h is the impulse response of the desired analyzer prototype low pass filter.
Similarly, the polyphase synthesizer includes an inverse FFT processor, followed by a set of polyphase filters whose outputs are combined by a commutator to yield the desired synthesized multiplexed signal. The inverse FFT providing M inverse transformed outputs to a bank of filters having M filter outputs feeding a commutator for combining the M filter outputs into a complex output. The commutator provides the complex output that is then upconverted by an upconverter for forming a wideband output. In the polyphase synthesizer, all of the K channels share a polyphase filter bank with the ith polyphase filter impulse response qi(m) given by qi(m)=f(mM+i) for i=0, 1, . . . , M−1 where f is the desired synthesizer prototype low pass filter impulse response. The total number of real multiplications required per second per channel are given by a MPDFT multiplication equation. In the MPDFT multiplication equation, the terms δ1 and δ2 are constants, the term B is the bandwidth, and the term w is the channel center frequency spacing.
            M      PDFT        =          2      ⁢              w        [                                            [                                                2                  3                                ⁢                                  log                  ⁡                                      [                                          1                      /                                              (                                                  10                          ⁢                                                      δ                            1                                                    ⁢                                                      δ                            2                                                                          )                                                              ]                                                              ]                                      (                              w                -                                  2                  ⁢                  B                                            )                                +                      4            ⁢                                          log                2                            ⁡                              (                K                )                                                    )              ]
However, the standard polyphase analyzer and synthesizer architecture is applicable to the case when the number of channels K is equal to the decimation factor M. When some user signals require larger frequency bands compared to other user signals, in principle, the user signal requiring larger frequency band may be allocated more than one adjacent channels out of K number of channels each of the same bandwidth. However, the filter roll off near the edges of the channels introduces band gaps among adjacent channels thus causing band gaps in the frequency band of the user allocated multiple channels which in turn causes distortion in the user signal. To avoid the problem of band gaps in the frequency band of the user with multiple channel allocation, it is desirable to introduce some overlap among the frequency response of adjacent channels. The said overlap is achieved by selecting the number of channels K greater than the decimation factor M. The selection of K greater than M thus provides signal fidelity to users assigned with multiple of the K channels. In the case when K>M, it is desirable to have similar computational and sample-by-sample processing advantages of the conventional polyphase architecture. Hence, it desirable to have a computationally efficient polyphase channelization system with a sample-by-sample processing architecture for the complex case where the number of channels K is not integrally related to the decimation factor M of the channelizer. Various modifications for the case when K is not integrally related to M, do not have the sample-by-sample processing and computational advantages of the conventional polyphase DFT method where essentially one filter operating at a single channel rate filters all the channels. In the case when some users require assignment of multiple channels, there is significant band gap and consequential distortion in the channelized signals when K is selected equal to M. These and other disadvantages are solved or reduced using the invention.